Here it is! (Ignore the “this sheet is private” notice, it’s a lie.) For those new to review-spreadsheeting, anyone can add reviews to it, whether your own or ones by others that you’ve come across (here on the forum, on IFDB, or anywhere else). When the existing space runs out, add columns for additional reviewers by right-clicking and choosing “insert 1 column”. There’s a section to the right specifically for reviews that are posted only in the private author’s forum. The sheet also has automatic color-coding based on the number of reviews each game has.
Thanks for putting this up.
We have our first doubly-reviewed game, Demonstration.
Using the Birthday Paradox formula (roughly) we’d expect this to take 1 + sqrt(4*71/3) = 11.4 reviews before this happened. Not sure when the 2nd review came in but we’re right on the nose.
12 Likes
Aaand we’re at 73 reviews, just over 1 for each entry! (Or we were at 11 AM Eastern, and I forgot to hit Reply.)
The overall median hit 1 at 10:53 yesterday morning (the 4th) thus making entries without a review red. At 1:56 PM the public median became red.
24 still are without a review.
If they were chosen entirely at random, we’d expect to have roughly 71 * (1/e) = 26 entries without a review. I’m impressed that we’re below that, as short games tend to get weighted a bit more, so if people are attacking the longer stuff, hooray for them! I think that’s good overall.
The random model doesn’t work as more people get close to reviewing, say, half of the games (I welcome this ruining of my model) but it’s neat to wonder when we’d expect to expect 1 entry left or .5 left.
calculations
If L(X) = expected number of unreviewed games left, L(R+1) = L(R) - L(R) / 71
Thus L(X) = 71 * (70/71)^x
L(X) = 1 => (70/71)^x = 1/71
For 1 left we’d need (roughly) (ln 71 / ln (71/70)) = 70 ln 71 = 298, for .5 left we’d need (ln 142 / ln (71/70)) = 70 ln 142= 346. (and generally, for y, 70 * ln (71/y)). And each 70 ln 2 ~ 48.5 reviews, we halve the expected unreviewed entries remaining.
Unless, of course, my calculation or memory is really bad.
TLDR: around 300 total reviews, we should have everything covered. But the community will probably have people looking at entries that interest them, or try to get each entry on the board, so it’ll probably happen before then.
8 Likes
A note for anyone confused by this—the section to the far right (labeled something like “private reviews (author’s forum)”) is for reviews that are only being posted in the IFComp Authors category of this forum, meaning only other IFComp 2026 authors can read them. If an IFComp author is posting their reviews publicly, those should go in the main section of the spreadsheet.
4 Likes
From recent past competitions, do we know how many reviews a game usually averages
Review spreadsheets from previous comps are still up (you can find them linked from individual comps’ wiki pages, e.g. IFComp 2025); assuming they’ve not been messed with since:
- IFComp 2025: average 8.73 reviews per game (max 15)
- IFComp 2024: average 11.30 reviews per game (max 21)
- IFComp 2023: average 15.73 reviews per game (max 27)
- IFComp 2022: average 11.8 reviews per game (max 22)
- IFComp 2021: average 11.2 reviews per game (max 23)
- IFComp 2020: average 10.81 reviews per game (max 26)
- IFComp 2019: average 9.66 reviews per game (max 19)
4 Likes
Wow that’s great. Reading the reviews is the real reward tbh
3 Likes